I'm not 100% this is the right place to ask, apologies if I am in the wrong place.

I have an old Win XP tower that I'm supposed to fix from 1999 for my grandpa. He got some nasty viruses on it and we can not bypass the password (he got one of those "your computer appears to have been hacked" phone calls and let them onto hix box) they locked the admin as well, and we can't find syskey (a couple people have tried this before I was asked to fix it). So I figure the best thing to do would be to just back up all of his documents to an external hdd, and give him a fresh install (unless someone has a better idea). Anyways his tower won't let me boot from USB for some reason (i've tried everything I know of to get it to and it just won't), so I created a Damn Small Linux cd to boot live, since apparently Ubuntu is now too big to fit onto a CD (I swear I have a v10 floating around somewhere, just can't find it sadly). From googling it seems lots of people have done exactly what I want to do, so it is more than capable of transferring files to an external from a xp partition.

As I am a newb when it comes to this stuff I learned I can't use NTFS with DSL, so I used the bootable usb on a laptop and partitioned it as FAT, which finally allowed me read/write access (it would read-only as NTFS just wouldn't let me write).

So now my question is, the external is a formatted, wiped clean. When I try to copy documents over to the external it copies a few files and throws a "no space left on device" error. It copied 2.9mb of data before throwing the error. Odd because it a 160gb hdd...

Any help would be appreciated.

Is it a problem with DSL, do I need to install DSL/Ubuntu onto the box itself and try it that way maybe? I don't know if the computer would even run ubuntu...it's a 500mhz processor with 640mb of ram...